Topic: Android

Samsung's plans to include a third party "kill switch" app on some of its premium smartphones to match Apple's iPhone Activation Lock theft deterrent system has been thwarted by phone carriers and fragmentation.

Android-based USB and HDMI TV sticks that incorrectly activate as tablets have proven popular in Asia, where they are reportedly used to pirate video content -- and could be inaccurately skewing Android's tablet market share at the cost of Apple's iPad.

Apple's iOS platform is widely considered to have the best mobile application ecosystem, and a new analysis of the App Store comparing it to Google Play for Android and the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire supports the notion that Apple remains head and shoulders above the competition.

Every quarter, the tech world's market research firms release metrics on how many PCs, phones and tablets Apple reported selling and compare these to estimates of what the rest of the world produced, resulting in headlines that minimize the importance of the world's largest and most profitable company. You might wonder why.

With a belief that Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry is in its death throes, major corporations and organizations continue to transition their employees away from the platform, with the latest discontinuation coming from pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

Samsung sought to assuage its investors' concerns about increasingly intense competition with Apple and the cooling market for premium Android smartphones, outlining a specs race that described a future with 64-bit Exynos chips, super high resolution mobile displays and a new focus on software.

Apple's share of smartphone sales through the September quarter nudged up 1.3 percentage points in the U.S., 2.2 points in Latin America, and a dramatic 7 points in Australia, while slipping 6.4 points in China and losing 2.3 points across Western Europe.

Beleaguered device maker BlackBerry on Monday announced that its popular messaging platform -- BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM -- is now officially available for iOS and Android, five months after it was first revealed.

Less than a month after it first went on sale, Apple's refreshed, moderately enhanced iPhone 5c has been targeted as possibly being a failure in scores of reports across a wide variety of major news outlets, even drawing comparisons to Microsoft's Surface flop. Can the company survive another 48 hours?

A major U.S. newspaper has compiled a scathing dismissal of iOS 7 as Apple's "most troubled," although it provided no actual metrics of the issues or a comparison of the release's reported problems to those seen in previous versions.

In its latest report of secure business mobility customers in the enterprise, Good Technology detailed rapid growth occurring in both device activations and custom app development, noting that Apple's iOS is overwhelming dominating both.

In 2007 Apple introduced iPhone, emphasizing that virtually every significant aspect of its entirely new experience and industrial design was protected by patents. So far, however, the U.S. patent system has provided inconsistent protections for Apple inventions, while at the same time supporting dubious patent monetization schemes brought against the company.

Over the last five years, Post-PC devices have displaced conventional Windows PCs so rapidly that Microsoft's dominance over personal computing has plummeted from roughly 90 percent share to less than a third.

In 2008, a journalist in Finland wrote a letter to Nokia complaining that its smartphones were difficult to use, prompting a confidential response acknowledging desperate efforts to catch up with Apple's new iPhone. One year later Nokia announced MeeGo, and the following year it made plans to shift to Windows Phone. The company is now being sold off for scrap.